The local Catholic Church has a lot of Hispanics attending. Interesting demographic change from the older mostly white attendees to the younger Hispanics with families, many of whom are not necessarily legal, but who are good citizens of our area and......I digress.

The Church, in the last few years has constructed three rather large crosses on the grounds. They have 'foot platforms' where the participants can stand while their arms are tied to the cross. Symbolic crucifixion. No one is actually nailed or harmed. I expect that we will see the crosses occupied this Easter again.

Interesting new development. I don't recall seeing symbolic crucifixion in Mexico when we lived there for many years.

Religion always attracts acetics who want to punish themselves and show off doing it.

But Christianity has no such doctrine, and is in fact called the good news announcement that in Christ all punishments are finished and the former sinners have already been made fully righteous as if they had never sinned.

Christianity thereby removes the reasons for prisoners to be punished. Christianity actually ends religious activities other than joyful celebration that it is over.

Jesus's only orders were that his believers spread the Good News message to the ends of the earth, and after that was done, then He would return and rule on earth.

I think what people miss about crucifixion is that it wasn't the nails that were the punishment, per se. Nearly all crucified prisoners were strapped to the cross in order to immobilize them completely, which causes excruciating pain. Try holding your arm in one place for five minutes. Imagine three days.

Even back then, when grotesque forms of execution weren't considered either cruel or unusual, crucifixion was the one to avoid at all costs.

Crucified men begged passersby to jab them in the side with spears or even break their legs (without their legs supporting their upper body, they could suffocate).

If the legs weren't broken, the legs would fatigue since there was no place to stand. If the condemned braced his/her legs against the upright, that would give some relief, but it couldn't be maintained indefinitely. It was really a form of slow torture.

As one historian noted, one of the survivors of Spartacus' army, for example, a gladiator and, thus, a very fit man, could last for as much as three days.

The Roman legionary who rammed a pilum into Christ's side did Him a favor.

rhhardin said...

I don't see how dying for our sins is supposed to work.

He removed the stain of Original Sin from us by suffering in our place. Kind of like the carbon offsets thing, except this is based on faith, not phony "science". Albert has delusions, as well as being a scam artist.

Vlad Dracul was said to have perfected impalement to such a degree that his practitioners could drive a stake through the entire body (starting in the anus) and out through the mouth while the victim was still alive. Hundreds were said to have been thus impaled along roadsides, many of them living for some hours.

The Crucifixion has been largely sanitized for us. The victim would have been completely naked and stayed alive for quite some time in order to reinforce the point of complete domination by Rome. They didn't mess around, the Romans.

rhhardin said...I don't see how dying for our sins is supposed to work.

I always thought of it as Jesus had the battering ram needed to break down the door between limbo and heaven.

The Limbo of the Fathers was the abode of people who, before Jesus' Resurrection, had died in the friendship of God, but had to wait for Christ to open heaven's gates. This concept of Limbo affirms that one can get into heaven only through Jesus Christ but does not portray Moses, etc., as being punished eternally in Hell.

The Harrowing of Hell (i.e. the liberation from Hell of the pre-Christ just) by Christ just doesn't get the play it deserves in western Christianity. It's a bigger deal in Eastern Orthodoxy. In your Wikipedia link, there's a link to the Harrowing.

Then again, there are some wonderful exceptions, as in this virtuoso castrato aria from Handel's La Resurrezione, sung by the Archangel who tells Hell to open its gates for the Savior.

Jesus did this as an act of love and an act of truth because God is Love and God is Truth.

And the truth is that sin exists. Sin exists and it has evil effects, sin causes horrific suffering. It causes death -- death of the body, death of the soul.

The effect of this sin is made manifest in Christ’s flesh. God takes that horror, caused by man, upon Himself.

Had God instead simply waved His divine hand, that would have been a lie. To simply pretend that the sin did not happen, that sin does not have horrific consequences, would have been wholly contrary to truth. And it would have been contrary to that aspect of truth which is justice.

The sin happened, the window was broken. You can forgive throwing the ball through the window, but you cannot simply act as if there is not a gaping hole in the glass. To pretend like the window is not still broken, even after forgiveness, is to allow the rain and snow to come in.

The truth is that the window is broken, the scales of justice must be balanced, justice requires a return to the status quo — an unbroken window. Thus, the truth is, and justice demands, that someone needs to suffer all the trouble to fix it.

Jesus volunteered for the job. Jesus takes the reality of sin, the truth of evil and the horrific consequences of sin, upon Himself so that we do not have to take it upon ourselves. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger said immediately before he was elected Pope, in Jesus on the Cross, love and truth coincide. Christ's mercy is not a grace that comes cheap, nor does it imply the trivialization of evil. Christ carries the full weight of evil and all its destructive force in His Body and in His Soul. He burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of His suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favour converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ. This is the vengeance of God: He Himself suffers for us, in the person of His Son.

The truth is that suffering caused by sin exists. If Jesus doesn’t take this terrible suffering upon Himself, we have to, as a matter of truth and justice, take it upon ourselves.

And the truth is that, not only does suffering exist, but death exists. People die. You cannot run away from death. God cannot defeat death simply by running away from it and pretending that it does not exist. Rather, to defeat death requires grabbing a hold of it and transforming it.

By the power of Love, which by its very nature is not only unitive, but fruitful and procreative, new life is born. In Jesus and the Cross, "all things are made new." (Rev. 21:5-6) He takes hold death, just as He takes hold of suffering, and by the transformative power of love, brings life to anyone who will be accept it.

They were not crucified. Crucified people are dead. Ultimately from asphyxiation.Like hanged people are dead.Though you can hang by your hands longer than by your neck.

"And then there is missing the point entirely. Which is what self-crucifixion is."

THANK you.

At least all those hair-shirters and self-flagellaters back in the day actually experienced pain. This is just a bunch of play-acting show offs unclear on the concept. Sad that the Church endorses this but they probably file it under "spreading the Word."

I was referring to the anecdotal observations by DBQ about her local church which mirror my own observations locally where I live. But I take your point that it's not "The Church" endorsing this nonsense.

I see. Yes, local church-related organizations of various ethnicities can have some practices that we would consider fairly odd or unwise. I'm sure they have their reasons and explanations, even if it's not something we are all that much into.

God did not require that the innocent Jesus suffer death on the Cross — mankind required that. Mankind scourged Him, mankind pounded those nails in. You and I did that, not God.

What God did do is to choose to take all the sins of the world, as manifested in the Passion, upon Himself. He did that, He chose that, as an act of love. Taking all the sin and evil of the world upon Himself so that it did not need to remain, as a matter of justice, upon sinners and evildoers, i.e. you and me.

Should we prefer that instead of God deciding to pay our debts for us, He simply told us to pay them ourselves?

It is a debt that can never be repaid. That is why He volunteered to pay it.

The truth is that suffering caused by sin exists. To ignore that sin and pretend that it did not happen would have been a lie by God and the real act of injustice.

And to allow the reality of the sin by us and its consequences to go unaddressed would not only be contrary to truth and justice, it would have been contrary to love. If Jesus doesn’t take this terrible suffering upon Himself, we have to, as a matter of truth and justice, take it upon ourselves. That is something that I would rather not do — my sins are far too great.

Human sacrifice was a staple with most of the mystery cults registered in Rome two millennia ago. Christianity was a departure from the norm in that after Jesus the ritual sacrifice performed was generally symbolic rather than actual.